A few weeks ago Philip Glenister was done for speeding on the A23 coming out of Brighton. “I was only doing 36 f***ing miles an hour,” he says offering up two open palms in a gesture of innocence. In relating the incident Glenister puts himself back at the crime scene remonstrating with the Old Bill.

He was duly fined and offered the chance to do a driver awareness course rather than take the three points on his licence. It was at this moment that he had a wonderful idea. He decided that he would attend the course as Gene Hunt, the lavishly sideburned, fast-quipping 1970s detective from Life on Mars and later Ashes to Ashes who made him a star.

“I thought: ‘I’m going to walk into this cop shop full of people done for speeding and say, “Fire up the Quattro, me old china! We’re going to have some fun revising the Highway Code!” ‘ ”

Glenister’s voice booms around the room and he convulses with mischievous laughter. It would have been a superb practical joke for the 48 year old, although who is to say how many extra points he would have collected on his licence if he had used a classic Hunt line on a real-life officer, one such as “Why don’t you run along and detect me a Garibaldi biscuit?”

When his wife, the actress Beth Goddard, found out about the plan she over-ruled him. She thought that the police would not see the funny side. Besides, she pointed out, after five years playing Gene Hunt, Glenister has worked hard to move on from the role. Turning up at a real-life police station in character would be throwing all that away. He took her advice, paid the fine and took the points.

This is a shame, first because when Glenister lets rip you realise that the legendary cop still lives within him, a bit like The Hulk but with a fag, a fist bunched inside a leather driving glove and a mouth that bunches up into a cats bum of a vindictive moue. Second, because he would probably got away with it: the police force really likes Gene Hunt.

“I regularly get photos sent to me from various cop shops round the country,” relates Glenister. “one of the most recent has got the whole station standing under the traditional portrait of the Queen. And then above her is a framed portrait of Gene Hunt. For some cops he seems to have usurped her Madge as the reason they go out there and keep the streets safe.”

But, sensibly and diligently, Glenister has moved on from his most lauded role. For one he has let go of the Gene Hunt diet. “Being an alpha male seems to involve carbs on a scale like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve been doing a lot of running to try and rediscover the man inside the fat,” he says.

Also, there was the chain-smoking. Throughout our meeting he seems to suck nervously on a black fountain pen. Then I notice vapour coming out of his mouth – definitely not smoke, something thinner and somehow more sinister – so that he looks positively demonic. It turns out he is taking urgent comfort from an “electric cigarettte” that his friend Scott Gorham from the band Thin Lizzy recommended to him. “Yeah, that’s how rock’n'roll my life is, tell the readers. The guitarist from Thin Lizzy has got me sucking cherry flavoured smoke out of a f***ing pen,” he says before extolling the contraptions virtues. The vapour contains nicotine but because there are no harmful passive emissions is legal in pubs and offices.

“You just look really thoughtful sucking this pen thing when really you’re just getting a nice hit,” he says.

Moving on from Hunt has involved the careful choice of roles. He played a sarcastic American vampire hunter in Demons on ITV, essentially Gene Hunt armed with cloves of garlic rather than a handgun to which audiences said “Fangs but no fangs”. He had more success with the coming-of-middle-age comedy-drama Mad Dogs on Sky1.

Today we meet at the BBC to talk about Hidden, a new four-part drama written by Ronan Bennett, in which Glenister plays the lead role of Harry Venn, a solicitor obliged to confront the murder of his brother 20 years previously, when an old lag steps forward with new info. Between smoking, shagging and visiting the local nick, Venn eventually finds himself at the centre of a wider conspiracy that threatens to bring down the British government. Although scripts were finalised last autumn there is considerable prescience here. The coalition government is fighting to stabilise a country stricken with inner-city riots against a backdrop of concern over media machinations.

Venn is like no other solicitor you will find in the Yellow Pages; after dumping his girlfriend and shagging his e-wife he works all night in his shabby office drinking, snorting coke and then bedding down in his clothes while his Cockney-geezer assistant, Matt, plays techno tracks on a turntable. You can’t imagine many first time buyers approaching this outfit for their conveyancing.

But Glenister says Harry Venn moves him on from Gene Hunt because he is clearly a man in pain. The boozing, shagging and shouting are a cry for help.

“I like the idea of this ordinary man getting in over his head, both personally and professionally, and into a huge conspiracy that involves the Royal Family, the Government and media. Gene Hunt was larger than life, had all the one-liners and was played big and broad, but there were no consequences. This is a drama, real life. In real life there are always consequences.”

In Hidden as well as in Mad Dogs, Glenister plays middle-aged wide bots struggling with a world they don’t quite understand. In real life he sounds far more settled.

Goddard and he have two children. Millie, 9 and Charlotte, 6. They live in quite well-to-do East Sheen in southwest London. And while he may play golf with members of Thin Lizzy and other showbiz friends at The Stage Golfing Society in nearby Richmond, at home air-kissing and name-dropping are off limits. “We don’t do showbiz in our house. I really don’t want my girls to go into the business. I have told them that it can be hard and nasty and it’s not about being famous, and that they’d be better off doing something else. I don’t want this for them. It’s getting harder, especially for women.

That is quite an admission considering that Glenister is from a minor acting dynasty. His father is John Glenister, a TV director who worked on the classic cop series Z Cars and Softly Softly. His brother, Robert is an actor who has been in Spooks and Hustle. As a youth Glenister wanted to be a milkman because you got the afternoons off. Then he saw his brother hanging upside down singing God Save the Queen in a play about the Sex Pistols.

“In the seventies, after punk happened, there was this feeling that the stage might be relevant to young people. It wasn’t Terence Rattigan. It wasn’t Chekhov. It was suddenly in tune with the time. That’s what drew me to it but I don’t think it would pull me in the same way now.

The age of fame for it’s own sake is depressing, he says. “My children are old enough to ask questions and so I tell them. “It’s not for fame. It’s not about autographs. It’s doing a piece of work well. Move on, life’s too short. Get over it.”

Some people’s sense of entitlement is just too brazen, though, and his inner Gene Hunt is piqued. Take his experience with Twitter. Fiercely anti-celeb, Glenister never thought that anyone would be interested in micro updates about brushing his teeth or eating a sausage. That is until someone started impersonating him.

“The bloody cheeck of it! I don’t want to tweet, “I have just yawned, love Philip Glenister”, but if there is anyone who has the right to do it, it is me!”

And so he is going to start tweeting soon. Maybe about his electric cigarette. Perhaps about golf. But you feel that what he would really like is a new app that would allow him to reach into someone else’s iPad screen with a Gene Hunt leather glove and throttle him.

“I guess I’m at that age when some bits of the world strike me as a little bit mental. At the end of the day I close my front door to acting. I want to be in the kitchen preparing a roast with a glass of wine, listening to Just a Minute. It’s the high point of civilisation in a mad world as far as I am concerned.”

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